15 Scientists Who Used Their Own Bodies As Laboratories
The field of science used to be a wild west that more closely resembled a bachelor party gone wrong than a tidy laboratory, but these days, it’s a highly regulated practice. If you want to do a science, particularly involving human subjects, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to prove you won’t intentionally kill anyone or inflict lasting psychological damage on them, which is really for the best. Do you want Tuskegee experiments? Because that’s how you get Tuskegee experiments.
Sometimes, though, the science you want to do is so inherently unethical that you have no choice but to do it to yourself. Even back in the wild west days, you couldn’t always convince a representative sample of people to, say, let you hit them in the junk after injecting cocaine into their spines. Thanks to the (occasionally actual) balls of these self-destructive scientists, we now know stuff that otherwise wouldn’t be possible to know (or at least what we don’t know).
Crossed His Heart, Hoped to Die
Don’t Tell Tom Cruise
Trigger Warning For ‘My Girl’ Fans
Turns Out It Was Vitamins
Big Deal, We Do That Every Sunday
Super Pumped
At Least It Worked
HSL University of Virginia,
Kwangmoozaa/Shutterstock
It Hurt to Pee For a Whole Different Reason
Annoying AND Dangerous
Blood, Sweat, and Vomit
Public Domain,
Sarah2/Shutterstock
Sleep Tight
Dr. Acula
Case Studies in Biomedical Research Ethics, by Timothy F. Murphy (via Google Books)
That’s Some People’s Idea of a Good Time
It Was a Gas
The Forbidden Canape
Akshay Sharma/Wiki Commons,
WikiEdtingProfile2021/Wiki Commons,
KuLouKu/Shutterstock